munich

Should celebrity chefs be worried? Willow Garage's PR2 robot is cooking up a storm, what with chocolate chip cookies at MIT and now Bavarian breakfasts in Germany.

Researchers at Technical University Munich recently paired PR2 with Rosie, a two-armed robot that has a Kinect 3D sensor like PR2. The robo-couple enacted a charming household scene of shopping for ingredients and cooking together.

In the vid below, the robots are seen preparing a Bavarian breakfast of Weisswurst sausages. PR2 retrieves objects from a shelf in a shopping simulation, then uses a bread slicer to cut up a baguette. It doesn't seem like PR2 uses the shopping goods when cooking, however.

Meanwhile, Rosie puts the Weisswurst in a pot, boils them, and places them on a plate for PR2 to serve with the bread. The demo, prepared by Munich-based CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems), gets a round of applause by onlookers.

They fared much better than this pancake-making robot, which still makes me laugh. … Read more

MUNICH, Germany--They all shared a medium: Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Alexander Calder, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and 12 others. But it wasn't canvas. In fact, it was the metal surfaces of a group of BMW cars, and together, for more than 35 years, they created one of the most unusual and unlikely collections of all time.

These are the BMW art cars, a group of 17 works by those world-famous artists and other leaders in the pop art movement. While most of the great works by these geniuses hang stationary on walls or stands around the world, … Read more

Swedish energy company Vattenfall announced today that it's partnering with Germany's largest utility to build a massive offshore wind farm in the North Sea at a cost of about 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) .

The DanTysk wind farm will consist of giant wind turbines supplied by Siemens and spaced out over a 70-square-kilometer area about 70 kilometers (42 miles) west of the German island of Sylt. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2012 and to wrap up by the start of 2014.

Once complete, the 288-megawatt wind farm is expected to produce about 1,320 gigawatt-hours of … Read more

Velcro's great, but for when you need that extra hold, there's a new hook and loop fastener made from spring steel in Germany that can pinch together loads of up to 35 metric tons, according to researchers.

The uber-Velcro, dubbed Metaklett, is also chemical-resistant and can withstand temperatures of nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, according to developers at the Institute of Metal Forming and Casting, Technical University Munich (TUM).

Although Velcro and its knockoffs have been used on everything from shoes to space shuttles since its invention by Swiss engineer George de Mestral 60 years ago, it has … Read more

New environmentally friendly, nitrogen-based explosives could deliver more of a bang while being safer to handle than traditional charges, according to chemists at the University of Munich in Germany.

When detonated, common explosives now used in military and industrial applications such as TNT and RDX generate toxic gases that pollute the environment. They're also dangerous to handle: They don't like to be dropped or bumped and are super sensitive to electrical sparks.

To make them safer and reduce environmental dangers, German scientists have turned to tetrazoles--synthetic compounds that derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of … Read more

When you fly to Europe from the West Coast, your choice of nonstop flights is rather limited. Outside of cities such as London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Frankfurt, you're usually forced to fly to a large hub airport and then change planes if you want to travel to another city. Such was the case when I flew to Barcelona for the recent GSMA World Congress. Since there are no nonstop flights to Barcelona from San Francisco, I had to fly to Munich first and then catch another flight from there. And all I can say is, I'm glad I … Read more